What is a Cognitive Bias?

Cognitive bias is a phenomenon in which when people perceive themselves, others, or the external environment, their perceptual results are distorted due to their own or contextual reasons. Typical performances include significant deviations and vivid deviations. Common stereotypes and halo effects in social perception are some forms of perception bias. It is due to the selective characteristics of personal perception. ^[1]

Cognitive bias

When teachers face a particular

How to explain cognitive bias is a very difficult problem. Economists believe that the brain usually adopts simple procedures to cope with complex environments, so deviations are inevitable. Social psychologists believe that cognitive biases are related to self-centered thinking tendencies, in order to maintain a positive self-image, maintain self-esteem, or maintain a good sense of self. However, evolutionary psychologists MG Haselton and D. Nettle believe that some explanations are unsatisfactory and give superficial answers. They put forward the theory of error management, thinking that the usual decision-making is not a question of not making mistakes, but of what kind of mistakes to make.

To put it simply, error management theory believes that human decision-making under uncertain situations usually faces the risk of errors. These errors can be divided into two categories: false positives and false negatives.

Error is definitely treating noise as a signal, such as identifying a person who is not sick as a disease; error negation is treating a signal as noise, such as identifying a person who is sick as a disease. The two types of errors usually have different costs in an evolutionary environment.

According to Hasselton and Leto, many cognitive biases are a manual of behaviors that natural selection equips people with, guiding them to adapt to the world in ways they make mistakes, because if they do nt, they can make more expensive mistakes . For example, the risk of treating poisonous mushrooms as non-toxic is much higher than the opposite. Therefore, if a primitive man looks for food in the wild and sees a mushroom that has never been seen before, and if it is impossible to judge whether the other party is poisonous, it is undoubtedly acceptable to assume that the mushroom is poisonous (even if such judgment may Wrong), at best is starving. But if this man is hungry and doesn't choose to eat, assuming the mushrooms are not poisonous, I am afraid that there will be the cost of death. Therefore, the misperception and judgment that unfamiliar mushrooms may be toxic can help people better adapt to the environment. ^[2]